Germany

406km from Bunde to Flensburg. Not a lot happened. We took about eight photographs (three were of that giant egg, fork and potato). I’m a bit bored just writing about it to be honest. I like Denmark a whole lot more.

We arrived into Germany on a dull cold Sunday morning when everything was shut. This feeling continued for several days. We passed through many small, nondescript, silent towns, past cow fields and farmyards. We seemed to go a long way without seeing anyone; there were signs of activity, but no actual people around.

Cornflowers

Finding a camp spot was a bit harder than in the Netherlands; every small town seemed to bleed into the next, with no obviously unused land in between. Every patch had recent tractor tracks, a wire fence or signs of grazing or haymaking, but with no helpful farmer to ask for a camp spot. On the second evening we made a detour away from the main road, to a quieter woodland area and knocked on a promising-looking door. The man who answered spoke as much English as we do German; he fetched another man, who took us down the road to speak to a woman (who also didn’t speak English), and we all went to the next-door farm. The man wandered off calling ‘Werner?! Werner?!’, his voice receding as he disappeared into a barn. The woman came back out of the barn, looking for the man (and presumably Werner). Eventually Werner appeared, and the first man, and the woman again, and a Jack Russell, and between them all they agreed that they didn’t know where we could camp. But we could try down the road at Number 27. Number 27 didn’t exist; Number 26 did, but was deserted apart from two very loud dogs. We rode around the corner and put the tent up on a wide verge, and didn’t see anyone else all evening.

Definitely ticks in the grass there.

At Albersdorf we found an Aldi, Lidl and Edeka all together, with a coffee van outside. This was a major Germany highlight. We bought coffees and ate poppyseed strudel as the lady chatted to us in German. We all agreed it was very, very cold. But almost Midsummer!

As we cycled past another deserted hamlet, a tiny black kitten trotted towards us from a garden, almost under our wheels. I scooped him up in one hand; he climbed up my shirt and purred under my chin. I popped him over the garden wall, but he still tried to follow. If I’d had a basket, he might have come with us.

Ticks have started to be a problem. We had to move our tent further into the woods one evening, after a passing cyclist told us there would be prison guards patrolling the area at night. Carrying everything through the undergrowth, we also collected several of the horrid things, and spent the evening searching every crease of the tent with our headtorches. They are so wide spread as to be almost impossible to avoid: if you walk through some grass, you’re likely to find a tick. There is a small chance of contracting Lyme’s Disease from a tick bite, usually if the tick has been attached for 36 hours or more. We’re being as careful as we can, as we don’t want to be getting bitten, looking for rashes, and visiting the doctor if we can help it! It makes me feel itchy just thinking about them. You could get bitten by a Lyme carrying tick in London, but it just doesn’t seem like such a worry when you have a house an hot bath to go back to every day.

We crossed the wide Elbe on a ferry, from Wischhafen to Gluckstadt. A German cyclist pointed out the white dome of the nuclear power plant he’d protested against in his Greenpeace days. A free ferry at Neuendorf-Saschenbande took us to Burg, from where it was just a day’s cycle up to Schlewsig.

First ferry for a while. Lots more to come, I hope.

We thought Schleswig would be a nice place to stop for a rest. A man in another campsite had said it was worth seeing, that there was lots of history, that it was a nice old town. We’d both read a Flashman book that was set in Schleswig-Holstein, so perhaps had something other in mind than the drab pedestrian shopping area that greeted us as we cycled in. It all had that Sunday afternoon feeling again, even on a Friday lunchtime. Coffee and cake in the bakery cafe cheered us up a bit, and we found a map of Denmark and some incredibly cheap dark beers for the evening.

Apple cake and nut cake.

The campsite was nice, with good hot showers and a man on reception who looked like a sea captain. A mole kept trying to tunnel under our tent in the night, and just could not be dissuaded with any amount of tapping from above. Steve started to get really annoyed with its nosing about next to him. Don’t punch a mole, Steve. It must have thought the bottom of the tent was a layer of earth: when we took it down, there was a half-exposed tunnel following the shape of the groundsheet.

Schleswig

The town improved a bit the next day in the sunshine, with its church towers and spires, and white boats in the harbour. We found a mystery cheese in a drybag, that we’d bought and forgotten about. It was small, round and translucent and speckled with caraway seeds. It was quite tasteless but it smelled strongly of sheep. I thought perhaps we’d mistakenly bought something made from boiled hooves. I looked it up later: it was harzer kaser, super low-fat high-protein sourmilk cheese, often used for sports nutrition. Unappetising but excellent cycling food.

The forgotten cheese.

We wanted to try curry wurst before we left the country, so popped into a butchers-cafe. A homeless-looking man was eating a sausage at a plastic table, and after a few minutes a woman came out of the back with her hands out in a ‘we’re out of sausages, what do you want?’ gesture. But they weren’t out of sausages, and she kindly obliged to serve us, even managing a small smile in the end. She then ignored an old lady with a shopping basket for a good ten minutes. I think her heart wasn’t really in it that day.

Curry wurst mit pommes.

After Schleswig, it was just 60km to Denmark. We hadn’t picked a very exciting bit of Germany to travel through, but at least it was flat. I’d definitely go back, but much further south. Scandinavia could hardly fail to be more exciting.

The Netherlands

Amsterdam to Nieuweschans – 388km

A fine collection.

We landed into Amsterdam on an early June morning – hopefully the last flight we’ll take for a very long time. We collected the bikes, pleased they’d arrived safely, and lugged them outside for re-assembly. We’ve got quite good at this now, and managed it quickly, even sleepy and frazzled from the long flight, in the bitingly cold wind outside the airport.

Amsterdam

Jumpers on, gloves on, we wobbled off down the cycle path which would take us all the way to our campsite. It sure was good to be in the Netherlands! Flatland! Land of the bicycle! The sun blinked out; we warmed up even peddling on the flat, passing windmills, following canals, and a rowing team (a man cycled along beside them, shouting through a brass megaphone).

We pitched up at the camping ground, which was really more like a festival site (call us squares, but it is nice to have a well-defined pitch for your tent, especially with beery youths on summer holidays all around, tripping over your guys…) We caught the tram and poked around the city, a bit too tired to take it in properly. I slept solidly that night, waking up in exactly the same position I’d flopped down in ten hours before.

Nice boats

It turned out warm and sunny for the next couple of days, with just a little thunderstorm, and we walked and trammed around on a bicycle shop tour of the city. Steve found the Ortlieb spares (destroyed by the Landcruiser) that had proved so elusive in Australia, and I got a shiny, sturdy new front wheel. I tested all the bells in a nice shop with a friendly marmalade cat, and settled on a metal teal ‘bing-bong’ type. Steve chose a sensible black ‘gzhhinngg’. We had a rye bread and potato salad picnic in the sun, wandered along the canals, over bridges, to the Sex Museum (it seemed like the best value thing to do, at just 4 EUR!). We couldn’t afford to visit the zoo properly, but you can go inside the gates to see the spoonbills and scarlet ibis in their huge aviary, and the flamingoes and capybara mooching about in the water. I even glimpsed a tapir.

La Tertulia

An art installation of people in beds.

We had coffees inside the post office (50 cents!) and not-coffee at a La Tertulia coffeeshop. Steve started to feel unusual (his words), so we made the wise decision to catch the rush hour tram on its winding route through the city, and to the Flevopark. An ice cream van played a peculiarly futuristic-sounding jingle, which we kept whistling for days.

In the Plantage

All the cyclists of Amsterdam, who sail along on their graceful high bikes, ferry their children around in pedal-powered wagons, carry small dogs and bouquets in their baskets. An old man, sun-tanned, cycling around town in tiny red swimming trunks; a young man, with the handle-bars of an exaggerated chopper, streaming a neon green cape behind him.

Canal caualty

We liked Amsterdam a lot. We could have moved into an apartment with flowery window boxes, on a cobbly street, by the Turkish supermarket. We could enrol at university and visit the cheese shops at weekends. I think we’ll be back.

Barge

We probably won’t revisit the campsite, which was fine, but attracted a certain crowd. A van load of German lads was expelled in disgrace (maybe due to the noise, maybe the campfire they built, maybe another misdemeanor). One afternoon as we sat inside the tent, there was scuffling and shouting in Italian close by. Concerned that the fight might spill over and onto our canvas home, Steve went out to find one man pinning another down, claiming he’d been robbed. The thief had a hammer. Steve ‘disarmed’ him (slipped the hammer out of his hand) and went to fetch help. It was all very confused, and in the end they both packed up and left. On the upside, there was an enclosure of friendly pygmy goats, and the fattest, glossiest hens I’ve ever seen. And most of the other campers were nice.

Look how much they are enjoying the sunshine!

We had a cycle map of the Netherlands, which showed the whole green web of bike paths across the country. It was nice to start out off the roads, but frustrating at times to be wiggling around so much, making slow progress. The paths did take us through some lovely small towns, with herringboned streets and wooden boats moored up on the river. We cycled through Spakenburg, Elberg, Nunspeet, Meppel, Norg and Appelscha, but unfortunately missed the Tolkeinian ‘Appeldoorn’.

Campsite, wind turbines.

We passed countless picturesque farms, with huge stately barns, thatched roofs and painted shutters. There were windmills, haystacks and fine sturdy cows in the fields, and everywhere we saw swans, cygnets, geese, goslings, ducks, ducklings, moorhens, oystercatchers, storks, lapwings, plovers and herons. And I’ve never seen so many hares! All the houses we saw were enormous and immaculate, and we started to suspect that the cycle paths were routed only to show you the prosperous side of the Netherlands, that the indirect routes were avoiding the council estates, the scrapyards and wastelands. Or maybe the Netherlands is all that pretty?

Campsite hens

We had some great camps; one by the water, with noisy frogs calling all night, another in a patch of waving meadow grass. Another at a field’s edge, where a man drove a horse and trap around in the evening sunlight.

Meadowy camp.

In Kampen, we cycled under the archways of the old town walls and had coffee and cake in a snug bakery: almondy gevulde koeke, apple- and sultana- filled vlaaipunt, and free coffee refills (Bakker Bart). The town bells, which hung exposed in concentric rings, played ‘Doe, a deer’ on the hour.

The LF9 cycle path after Wapseveen took us through shady woodland and nature reserves, and then a big undulating, wind-blasted heathland,  which is exactly what you don’t want when looking for a camping spot. Somewhere around Appelcha, we had the BEST CHEESE IN THE WORLD. It looked like a sort of blue cheese, maybe Cambazola, but was actually a brie, with a layer of herby Boursin through the middle. I tried to think of other two-cheese combinations to rival it, but drew a blank.

By Groningen we were ready for a rest day. We found a campsite with lovely daisy-covered pitches, and fluffy hens scratching around in the flowerbeds. It was hot and bright, and we cycled through the huge shady Stadtspark to town. There were smart students everywhere, lounging about on the grass and sunbathing on their doorsteps and windowsills. We felt old and scruffy. Groningen is a very pleasant place, with a big busy market square, lots of dark brick towers and gingerbread buildings. We bought eggs to boil for breakfast (a campsite luxury) and visited a fantastic outdoors shop (Bever). There were many beautiful things. We looked at everything: chose Fjallraven bags, titanium teapots, lightweight neon running shoes. We bought just a map of Germany, but we took our time about it, used the big map table, enjoyed the free coffees. I could have spent all day there. We poked our heads into The Clown coffeeshop. A short-haired lady was picking up screws, which were strewn all over the floor. A man walked in, chuckling, with a dustpan and brush. I got the feeling it was a regular occurrence.

Groningen

We left the campsite and headed on towards Germany. It was grey and a little humid. We stood outside Aldi eating sugarloaf and it started to rain. We rolled through a small town, people packing up stalls at the end of a fair; it all felt a bit drab and dismal, but we bought a waffle and the rain stopped. We passed through a very strange village – Nieuw Beerta – with the most enormous grand houses, each one entirely characterless and cold-looking. We saw only one human being: a Joanna Lumley lookalike walking a spaniel. It was otherwise quite forlorn and deserted feeling, though there was a ‘nightclub’ in an ordinary brick house, with a red neon ‘open’ sign on the wall.

Schwalbe tyre shoe mend.

On our last night in the Netherlands, we stayed in a little campsite in a garden, with copper-coloured hens and a cosy cabin with a coffee machine. We managed to get a little lost, leaving and reentering Nieuweschans on the border, before pedalling into Germany. We had expected a little more fanfare: a ‘Wilkommen’ sign, or at least a flag to announce our arrival into a new country. All we saw was this giant egg, fork and potato. Welcome to Germany.

No idea.